#1204 - Steven Rinella

Steven Rinella (0:02)

You know what's funny? I'll tell you later.

Joe Rogan (0:04)

Tell me now. Three, two, one.

What's funny?

Steven Rinella (0:09)

I was going to tell you a funny story about your address, but it wouldn't be funny for you.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

We'll talk later about that. You and I, we share African ancestry.

Steven Rinella (0:23)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:24)

Yeah.

Steven Rinella (0:24)

I was shocked.

Joe Rogan (0:25)

Yeah, I'm 1.6 percent.

Steven Rinella (0:27)

Oh, really?

Joe Rogan (0:27)

Yeah.

Steven Rinella (0:28)

See, I have more credential than you in that department.

Joe Rogan (0:31)

You're 2 percent, right?

Steven Rinella (0:32)

Yeah, I know. And it's funny because you sort of have the story in your family, kind of like where you came from and everything, mates. And I always knew I was 25 percent Italian, and I knew that my family came from Sicily. In fact, the Rinellas that came from Sicily all seem to become kind of established in the produce world.

My dad was brought up in the south side of Chicago.

I'm 44 years old, okay? So think about that for a minute. My dad was brought up in the south side of Chicago, and he was raised by his grandfather, who was Sicilian and had come from Sicily. His grandfather delivered produce with a horse and cart in Chicago. So to have lived through that, to be brought up in a house where a guy leaves in the morning in a horse and cart to deliver produce, and then to be alive, to fight in World War II, to be through the atomic era, the advent of the internet, right? But I always knew that we had Sicilians. When I did the genetic test, at some point in time, one of those Sicilians must have shot southward and crossed the Mediterranean and had a hookup down there or something.

Joe Rogan (1:54)

Well, that was the history of Sicily in the first place. You know, Sicily, just being Sicilian in the first place, there were so many people that were impregnated by the Moors and by various people of West Africa and North Africa.

Steven Rinella (2:10)

And yeah, I should have probably always assumed, but I hadn't thought about it.

Another thing I was reading about this stuff, and you might know more about it than I do, is that when you do those tests, there's missing parts. You know, it captures what's there, but there could be a lot there that's not captured just in the way that chromosomes are inherited and passed down. Like, it's an incomplete picture, right? There could be influences. There could be, it doesn't create a full picture of your lineage. There could be lineages that are there that aren't represented in your particular makeup.

Joe Rogan (2:49)

How so? Like, what do you mean?

Steven Rinella (2:52)

You know, I hate to right off the bat get into something that I can't speak about with any level of expertise. I was just reading a piece, and the piece I was reading had to do, it was kind of a dissection of, like, what happened with Elizabeth Warren, which she claimed.

Joe Rogan (3:06)

We've been going off about that on the podcast, and I'm like 100 times more African than she is Native American.

Steven Rinella (3:12)

Yeah, well, that's what I found. I'm 10 times more or whatever, but it was a piece in The Times explaining how to make sense of, now that everyone's doing these tests, how to think about and make sense of these tests. But my understanding of it is that you could have a lot of ancestry that just isn't captured in your genetic code in a way that would be detected through the testing. Meaning there could be ancestors that for what, because you're inheriting half, you're inheriting chromosomes from each parent.

And somehow you could have, it could be an incomplete picture. You could have ancestors that had come from other, whatever these tests break out the world into 100 or some odd regions or zones, that there could be people from those zones who are in your lineage that are not captured in your personal, that are not captured in your genetic code.

Joe Rogan (4:05)

That's so bizarre. You would think it would all be in there. Is that just an incomplete measuring tool?

Is that what it is? Or is it just actually not in there?

Steven Rinella (4:14)

I don't know. You're gonna have to have a dude on.

I'll listen. You need to have a dude on that understands it. And as I say, I feel like I'm off on a bad start here, man.